SaaS Roundup #147

This week sees a new lesson in our SaaS Metrics Refresher course. If you're not part of the course just yet, you can start from the beginning here (you'll get all lessons).

🚨 Heads up! ChartMogul is hiring an Account Executive to help us work with prospective customers across the SaaS industry. If you know someone who'd be a good fit and wants to join a dynamic, creative team, just reply to this email or apply here.

How Instapage is using ChartMogul to move upmarket

Sara Archer

Instapage CEO Tyson Quick shares how his team leverages ChartMogul to track the health of the business, plan for the future, and experiment with different optimizations.

"When examining retention segmented by customer plan, Instapage noticed that one plan had a retention rate that was almost twice as high as other plans. The company decided to run an experiment: offer only that plan, plus an enterprise plan."

This week's top reads

"Is 25x revenue a crazy price to pay to invest in a fast growing SaaS company?" This the question we start out with in this walkthrough of applying a discounted cash flow (DCF) approach to valuing SaaS businesses.

"Most investors use revenue multiples of comparable companies to value SaaS businesses. However, a lot can be learned about the true value of a business at a given point in time by thinking deeper about the value of the cash it will eventually generate, and how likely that is to happen."

Wow — there's plenty here to pick apart here, and some nice insights in the marketing strategy lessons. Should be useful for other bootstrapped SaaS startups.

"While email prospecting did start the majority of our sales conversations in 2018, in retrospect I wish I had spent less time here. While it’s a strategy that I think was appropriate given our stage - my goal was basically to stir up a small number of early accounts without spending any money - if I could do it again I’d focus more time in areas that would deliver longer term, sustainable gains. Like content marketing."